M1ANM431 - Painting Antiquity : The Lure of the Past in 19th-century Art and Literature - CRibeyrol

Painting Antiquity: The Lure of the Past in 19^th-century Art and Literature - Charlotte RIBEYROL

Throughout the 19^th century, Britain was in the vanguard of industrial progress. And yet the ancient past remained a powerful cultural paradigm as the classical curriculum still shaped public life, especially for the political and cultural elite. Drawing on new developments in the field of classical reception studies, this seminar will address the Victorians’ complex relationship with the past, in particular with Greek and Roman antiquity. The nineteenth century is indeed a key moment to think about what was long referred to as the ‘classical tradition’ and its influence on Western art. However, with the rise of the new sciences of archaeology and anthropology in the 1870s, the antique past could no longer be confined to a body of ancient texts. Despite the strong ideological resistance of many, this progressive shift from a purely philological understanding of the antique past in favour of a broader – and often more subversive – approach to ancient material culture (whether Assyrian, Egyptian, Hellenic or Pompeian) inspired numerous artists and writers hoping to challenge the hegemony of classical norms, from John Keats to Simeon Solomon and Oscar Wilde. 

This course will therefore explore the multifaceted engagement of major Victorian authors and painters with antiquity so as to show how the arts, politics and religion of ancient Egypt, Assyria, Greece or Rome were appropriated in various ways to serve jarring aesthetic and ideological agendas. 

The seminar will be held in English. No prior knowledge of Ancient Greek or Latin is required.

Students are expected to analyse an image and/or a literary or critical text each week. The assignments will be a 20-minute oral presentation and a research paper (handed in at the end of the semester).

Dissertation topics can broach any aspect of the reception of the ancient past in 19^th-century literature, painting and/or sculpture. 

Selective bibliography:

Clarke, G. W., ed. Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Evangelista, Stefano-Maria. British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Goldhill, Simon. Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Hardwick, Lorna. Reception studies. Published for the Classical Association by Oxford University Press, 2009

Hurst, Isobel.  ‘The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in the Victorian Period.’ In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Edited by Paula Rabinowitz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Martindale, Charles. ‘Introduction: Thinking Through Reception’. In Martindale, Charles; Thomas, Richard F. (eds.). Classics and the Uses of Reception. Maldon and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

Moser, Stephanie. Designing Antiquity, Owen Jones, Ancient Egypt and the Crystal Palace. New Haven and London: Yale UP / Paul Mellon Centre, 2012.

Moser, Stephanie. Painting Antiquity, Ancient Egypt in the Art of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Poynter and Edwin Long. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020.

Ribeyrol, Charlotte. « Étrangeté, passion, couleur », L’hellénisme de Swinburne, Pater et Symonds (1865-1880). Grenoble, ELLUG, 2013.

Sachs, Jonathan. Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789-1832. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.

Vance, Norman. ‘Victorian.’ In A Companion to the Classical Tradition. Edited by Craig Kallendorf, 87–100. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.